Buoy
Stand on the edge of the diving board.
The winds are slow, yet they make you shiver. The light in the evening is low, like your exhausted father, who sits near the edge of the pool with a beer in his hand, talking to his friend. Notice the murmur around the pool grow larger in volume. It was probably a minute or so ago that everything felt quiet as snow.
Your skin is gooseflesh now. Your nipples harden. You feel exposed, like being caught in an intimate moment. Take a deep, slow breath. Rub your palms together.
You take a moment to decide whether you would like to keep your eyes open or closed while making the dive. You decide to go with open eyes because you would know when to hold your breath when you hit the water.
Now you’re ready to dive. You assume your position, with your hands stretched well above your head and your feet on your toes. After two small jumps, you make the dive. Like a graceful whale in the distance, you mean to go inside the water in a straight line, like a pin.
But something happens while you’re doing it; something about this act doesn’t feel right. The wind is too cold. Your chest is too exposed. While you were stretching, people stopped drinking for a moment to watch you. They did not watch you out of admiration. Nor out of contempt. They just saw someone stretching out to make a dive, and they decided to stop whatever they were doing to watch the dive. It was only natural human tendency. It wasn’t their fault.
You, however, felt the entire weight of adulthood, all three years of it, being pushed upon your shoulders in your whale-shaped diving position. You felt uncomfortable, not necessarily violated though. It was like someone was watching you read a book of a somewhat erotic nature from distance.
You do at that time the one thing that your quick thinking brain urges you to. Mid-air, you hold your legs together, your knees beside your chin, in a fetal position. You are not dropping like a pin, or a pipe anymore. You are moving like a bowling ball in an alley. It’s satisfying though, your movement. You close your eyes. You are in a safe place. Everyone would be back to what they were doing soon.
Your arched back touches the water first, giving you enough time to successfully hold your breath. It takes only a microsecond for you to go inside. There you finally stretch your body again, your hands stretched on your sides, your legs spread out. Free fall. Your hair stand in the water against gravity, like a lion’s mane, like shrubs growing out on a hill. Everything’s quiet as snow. You don’t even feel the chlorine against your nose. You’re not an adult. You’re not even a human being, in fact. You’re alone. You wish that this moment would freeze. If that would happen, you would remove your swimming costume, a bright, orange one, which doesn’t match at all with your earthy, young skin.
You keep on feeling the pressure against your abdomen and your thighs, to go up, up, up.
Your head is above the water, now. You are breathing in, deeply, watching the lights mixed in with the sounds and the cold, cold wind. You debate whether to stay in the pool or not, as neck down, no one can see your twenty one year old body. But other people are swarming in the pool slowly, some are diving hastily, some are using the ladder. It’s not your space anymore. They are even bringing a ball, maybe to play water polo.
You climb out of the pool using the ladder. The rungs feel slippery, and even a little slimy. The pool is not a quiet place anymore, its surface is now brittle with all the splashing. You sit on the lawn in a crouched, knees-between-your legs position, while your mother hands you out a fresh towel to dry yourself up.
